Signup for the Newsletter

Eye candy: Whiskytree’s ultra-detailed Elysium VFX

Digital environments quickly get complex. But few get as complex as the one Whiskytree created for Elysium.

According to the VFX breakdown it just posted on Vimeo, the orbiting space station the studio created for Neill Blomkamp’s sci-fi thriller runs to “trillions of surfaces”, including 66 unique buildings.

Vegetation was created in Exlevel’s 3ds Max plugin GrowFX. According to Whiskytree, the environment contains 61 unique tree models and 30 other plants.

Interestingly, the company notes in the comments to the video that the work was done on “modest-sized machines with prosumer hardware”, relying instead on “a LOT of memory”. Eye-catching stuff.